Briney KA, Coates H, Goben A (2020) Foundational Practices of Research Data Management. Research Ideas and Outcomes 6: e56508. https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.6.e56508
Abstract: The importance of research data has grown as researchers across disciplines seek to ensure reproducibility, facilitate data reuse, and acknowledge data as a valuable scholarly commodity. Researchers are under increasing pressure to share their data for validation and reuse. Adopting good data management practices allows researchers to efficiently locate their data, understand it, and use it throughout all of the stages of a project and in the future. Additionally, good data management can streamline data analysis, visualization, and reporting, thus making publication less stressful and time-consuming. By implementing foundational practices of data management, researchers set themselves up for success by formalizing processes and reducing common errors in data handling, which can free up more time for research. This paper provides an introduction to best practices for managing all types of data.
Cornell Research Data Management Service Group (2020) Guide to writing "readme" style metadata. https://data.research.cornell.edu/content/readme.
A readme file provides information about a data file and is intended to help ensure that the data can be correctly interpreted, by yourself at a later date or by others when sharing or publishing data. Standards-based metadata is generally preferable, but where no appropriate standard exists, for internal use, writing “readme” style metadata is an appropriate strategy.
Piwowar HA, Vision TJ. 2013. Data reuse and the open data citation advantage. PeerJ 1:e175 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.175